Living in Singapore: Housing Policies between Nation Building Processes, Social Control and the Market

Denis Bocquet (1, 2)

1 LATTS - Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés
2 AMUP - Architecture, morphologie / Morphogénèse urbaine et projet

Housing policies have been at the very core of the national ideology of Singapore since the time of independence in 1965. The task of providing a flat to citizens and permanent residents thanks to the efforts of a public institution has not only been one of pragmatic realism, or an aspect of the application of economic theories pertaining to the sphere of developmentalism, it also constituted a central feature in the collective project of a City-State in which social engineering was conceived as a global duty of the ruling party and comprised various aspects of the organization of everyday life, from urban planning to housing or from education to leisure and civic engagement. With about 80% of the population (5.5 million inhabitants in 2015) housed in flats built by the Housing and Development Board ( HDB), Singapore remains in 2015, in spite of the recent diversification of the housing market, one of the cities in the world in which the share of population housed in publicly built estates is the highest. 95% of the inhabitants of Singapore that are housed in such HDB flats, though, own them on a 99-year lease agreement. In the stronghold of capitalism in South-East Asia, social housing was conceived, since the time of independence, as a way to reinforce private property and the familial values that are attached to it. The object of the present paper is to analyze the evolution of this ideology of social housing in Singapore from the moment of the invention of the HDB as an instrument of national development and social balance to the period of the necessary adaptation of this heritage to the new needs that emerged twenty years after independence and up to more recent challenges posed by the concurrence of alternative models and social imaginaries of housing, such as those embodied by condominiums.

A Singapore la questione dell’abitare è stata al centro delle politiche pubbliche sin dal periodo del self government nel 1959. Il modello scelto è stato quello della costruzione massiccia di new towns da parte dell’Housing and Development Board (hdb) per alloggiare la popolazione in appartamenti venduti ai beneficiari grazie ad un sistema di prestiti sovvenzionati. Il modello ha conosciuto nel tempo varie riforme ma lo spirito iniziale è sempre rimasto percepibile. A partire dall’inizio del nuovo secolo, tuttavia, una maggiore apertura del mercato immobiliare agli attori privati ha rimesso in questione la logica stessa del sistema pubblico. L’articolo analizza l’impatto della riforma sulle culture dell’abitare, tra rischio di rottura negli equilibri locali di un’urbanità concepita attorno a una visione relativamente egualitaria delle politiche edilizie

Mots clés: Housing; Housing and Development Board; urban; architecture; national ideology; new towns

Mots clés: ideologia nazionale; alloggio; Singapore

Domaines: Histoire; Architecture, aménagement de l'espace

Denis Bocquet. Living in Singapore: Housing Policies between Nation Building Processes, Social Control and the Market. Territorio, 2015, Domesticating East Asian Cities (guest edited by Filippo De Pieri and Michele Bonino), 74, pp.35-43. ⟨10.3280/TR2015-074006⟩. ⟨hal-01224147⟩